{"id":5817,"date":"2020-10-23T19:21:58","date_gmt":"2020-10-23T23:21:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.dr-chuck.com\/csev-blog\/?p=5817"},"modified":"2020-10-23T19:26:47","modified_gmt":"2020-10-23T23:26:47","slug":"email-answer-can-you-help-me-with-my-learning-or-one-of-your-free-open-classes-that-i-am-taking","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.dr-chuck.com\/csev-blog\/2020\/10\/email-answer-can-you-help-me-with-my-learning-or-one-of-your-free-open-classes-that-i-am-taking\/","title":{"rendered":"Email Answer: Can you help me with my learning or one of your free \/ open classes that I am taking?"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I get a number of messages per week from students who take my courses online.\u00a0 I have well over a half million online students so I don&#8217;t have time to individually respond to all the messages I get via Twitter, Email, or LinkedIn.<\/p>\n<p>I do skim all the messages I get &#8211; but only reply to a few.<\/p>\n<p>Before I talk about the messages that I don&#8217;t answer, let me talk about the messages that I *do* answer like the following:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>I am using an auto-grader in your course and it is broken.\u00a0 If you have a screen shot where my code has an error message &#8211; I want to know about it and want to fix it.\u00a0 I will bug you and ask you to keep testing the problem until I verify it is fixed.<\/li>\n<li>If you find a typo or mistake in one of my web sites or books &#8211; I would like to hear about it.\u00a0 I like to fix little things so the quality of the materials is kept high.<\/li>\n<li>If you want to translate some of my course material to a new language &#8211; that is really cool and I want to hear about that.<\/li>\n<li>You are a teacher and want to adopt or have used my materials for a course you are teaching.\u00a0 I love that and want to hear about it.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>The following types of messages are read &#8211; but I rarely reply to them:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Can you write a recommendation for me?\u00a0 I only write recommendations for students I work with outside of class.\u00a0 I don&#8217;t even write recommendations for students who take my courses on-campus at University of Michigan.\u00a0\u00a0 I *understand* that recommendations are difficult to get.\u00a0 I just feel really bad writing a recommendation that says &#8220;I had Tony in class, and because he did not cause any trouble I would not even recognize Tony if he came up to me.&#8221;\u00a0\u00a0 I love writing recommendations for students when there is real collaboration.<\/li>\n<li>Could you design a plan of study for me? Could you give me career advice?\u00a0\u00a0 I have some videos about career advice in some of my courses but don&#8217;t have time to be an individual career counselor.<\/li>\n<li>Can you be my mentor?\u00a0 I only mentor about 2-4 students per year &#8211; and I work with students because their interests (i.e. educational technology, open source, and open content) align with my interests and I get help from the students on my work.<\/li>\n<li>Any question about Coursera, edX, or FutureLearn payments, dates, sessions, etc.\u00a0\u00a0 I provide my material to these MOOC platforms and they run the courses.\u00a0 I don&#8217;t have veto power over what the platforms do or when the courses run or what the due dates are for each assignment.<\/li>\n<li>Could you sign a certificate of attendance so I can get reimbursement?\u00a0 This is an issue with the MOOC providers &#8211; I do not check ID nor take attendance in these courses so I can not and certify anything.<\/li>\n<li>Any message about an honor code violation where you &#8220;mistakenly&#8221; uploaded something that was not your own work and you got caught.\u00a0 These messages usually weave some long intricate story and want &#8220;one more chance&#8221; &#8211; I ignore these messages.\u00a0\u00a0 Read the assignments, do your own work and don&#8217;t take short cuts.<\/li>\n<li>Can we connect on LinkedIn?\u00a0 I only connect on LinkedIn to people I know professionally.\u00a0 I don&#8217;t connect to students at all until I have worked with them on a project.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>As I said above &#8211; I do see virtually every message and skim them all.\u00a0 Sometimes something in a message will jump out at me.\u00a0 Skimming a message is pretty quick but writing a reply takes a lot of time that I just don&#8217;t have.<\/p>\n<p>It does not make me happy to ignore these messages &#8211; I wish I had time to reply to them all.\u00a0 If I replied to every message it would take more time than I have in a day and I would get nothing done :(<\/p>\n<p>So I apologize in advance.<\/p>\n<p>-Chuck<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I get a number of messages per week from students who take my courses online.\u00a0 I have well over a half million online students so I don&#8217;t have time to individually respond to all the messages I get via Twitter, Email, or LinkedIn. I do skim all the messages I get &#8211; but only reply [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5817","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dr-chuck.com\/csev-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5817","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dr-chuck.com\/csev-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dr-chuck.com\/csev-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dr-chuck.com\/csev-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dr-chuck.com\/csev-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5817"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.dr-chuck.com\/csev-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5817\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5822,"href":"https:\/\/www.dr-chuck.com\/csev-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5817\/revisions\/5822"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.dr-chuck.com\/csev-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5817"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dr-chuck.com\/csev-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5817"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.dr-chuck.com\/csev-blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5817"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}